


The Loneliest Kind of Love

by Meduseld



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Fantasizing, Horny Teenagers, In a mild case, Internalized Homophobia, It's all implication, M/M, Masturbation, Richie's not in this but he's all over this you feel me?, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 03:54:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13650879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: After Derry, Eddie’s got no one to play with but himself. (Or, masturbation as an excuse for character study).





	The Loneliest Kind of Love

The poster is old, but still in good shape. Eddie doesn’t like to think about what that means.

Farrah Fawcett is smiling in big hair and a one piece red bathing suit that doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Not that Eddie’s got much of one. For this anyway.

That’s how he knows he wasn’t imagining the small triumphant smile on his mother’s face when he pinned Farrah up, even as she made noises about _appropriate room decorations._ It’s the only time Eddie’s ever put anything up. In New Jersey, anyway.

The Paramus house is different from the one in Derry. It’s smaller, for one, but brighter too. The windows are bigger or cleaner, Eddie can’t quite decide. Life is different too.

His mother’s laser like focus on him has lessened, partly because now that he’s sixteen and, after he agonized through a growth spurt the previous year, Eddie doesn’t look like a kid anymore. Even if he’ll stay short, like she says his father was. And partly because she’s got Aunt Blanche to fuss over instead. They’d moved down to help her manage the house when her arthritis got really bad, or at least that’s what his mother had said. Eddie thought what she really wanted was to put Derry and all the hurts, real and imagined, they’d suffered there in her rearview mirror. He can’t really blame her. Besides, by then Bill and Stan had been gone too.

“You’re a fake bitch, Kaspbrak” Richie had said instead of goodbye before pulling him in for a noogie. For a wild moment, pressed against Richie’s chest and breathing him in, all dirt and sweat and _boy_ , Eddie had wanted to ask him to come with them. Just bundle him into the station wagon next to the vaporizer and the box full of thermometers. His parents probably wouldn’t have even noticed. But then Eddie’s mother had pressed down on the horn and Eddie had pulled away. “Au revoir, Eds!” he’d called in a terrible French accent and Eddie had carefully flipped him off when his mother turned away. They’d both politely ignored the tears in their eyes.

Last summer he’d gotten a postcard, with a dick joke on it, stamped Calaveras County, California and signed RT. He didn’t write back, didn’t know what to say. He can barely remember the sound of Richie’s voice, or make that _voices_. Bill is still clear in his mind but the others are fading, fast. Some days he spends all of sixth period with the name of their club on the tip of his tongue. Was it lovers or losers?

Eddie doesn’t really have any friends at school. He keeps to himself mostly, now that he’s invisible. There’s no Big Bill to take him on impossible adventures that seem less likely all the time, but there’s also no Henry Bowers to chase him down the halls calling him names.

At his old school he’d have been terrified of asking the other boys after a kid like Tommy Torrance. The again at his old school he’d have already known who the kid like Tommy was. Or Richie would have.

Tommy wasn’t surprised when Eddie talked to him, told him what he wanted, just nodded with heavy lidded eyes. 20 bucks and a meeting at the back of the musty gym locker room later, Eddie was peddling home, the Farrah poster tucked under his arm, still pristine even though it was ten years or so out of date.

He’s thinking about Tommy now, hand idly teasing under his waistband as he stares at Farrah. He’d have really beautiful eyes, a seagrass green, if they weren’t always bloodshot. His hands are solid too, he thinks, as he moves to really grip himself, nails a tease on the shaft.

But that’s normal, isn’t it, to think of Tommy while looking at her. They’re linked together in his mind, one following the other. He shakes the thought, because that’s the whole point of this. He fixes his mind on her nipples, digging his fingers in a little harder. It’s good, good enough that his hips cant and his neck moves back.

Farrah is a red blur in the slits of his eyes, enough that it makes him think of the football uniforms the boys in Derry wore. Before he can stop himself, his mind plays him a highlight reel he pretends he doesn’t have: strong thighs and broad chests and big hands moving in the shower in the corner of his eye.

Eddie shakes his head, like a wet dog says a thought that sends him careening even further away from the track he wants. For one horrifying moment he’s back in Derry and the flicker-flash of _Bill’s lips-Stan’s hair-Mike’s muscles-Ben’s eyes-Richie_ is so thrilling as to make his heart stop in complete guilt and terror and love. Above all love.

He breathes hard, grips himself tight enough to send a bolt of pain arching through his spine and focuses on Farrah again. Her curves, her hair. She smiles encouragingly down and his lips twitch, just a little.

His hand moves faster and faster, the pads of his fingers teasing it his head, his crown, his slit and just like that his eyes are rolling back. When he opens them again, other hand working under his shirt with a mind of his own, Farrah’s gone so far away she might as well be on Mars.

Richie Tozier is straddling him, in his mind’s eye, and he’s never been happier. He’s here, fully formed from memories Eddie can’t seem to find in when all his blood is in his head but can’t quite get rid of, either. He’s still pale and skinny, but filled out some, chest invitingly flat and almost invisibly freckled. His glasses are off, his eyes big and wide and vulnerable, framed by a halo of black hair. His lips are chapped, bitten, like always and Eddie knows he’d taste of that gum he liked, the greenish purple one he got from Freese’s.

He knows he’s panting now, mouth open while dream Richie moves above him. His tongue moves along his lower lip and Eddie's hips cant helplessly up, mind on fire with want. He wants it to be his tongue, always has, always _did_. Eddie's hands grip uselessly at himself trying to feel something like Richie's skin. Above him, the Richie that lives in his brain starts to move. 

His hands, always so rough Eddie remembers, and dry from spending all summer gripping the handlebars of his bike, start moving under the band of the underwear he’s inexplicably wearing, a perfect match to Eddie’s own. Their hands move in unison, tighter, hotter, faster. He can almost, almost, feel the ghost of his breath. His bed rocks back just a little and he almost stills but this is just too good.

His skin feels tight and the tiny glimpse of black curls peeking between Richie's fingers his mind finally deigns to supply sends him spiralling out of control, spurting helplessly into his hand with a groan.

When Eddie finally manages to open his eyes, vision still blurred, Richie’s gone. The only one there is Farrah, smiling in a way that says _Sorry Charlie._

He bites his lip, trying to hold back tears suddenly. He shakes his head again. He’ll try later, the perks of needing it so much, being the age he is. One of the only ones.

He tries stretching out and winces, a dull throb lodged somewhere deep inside the flesh of his arm. It twinges sometimes, the phantom ache from the long ago break. His thoughts skitter away from the idea of it, the adrenaline smeared haze of how it happened. He doesn’t think about it. Can’t, maybe. At least he can usually tell when it’ll rain.

It makes him think of Mike again, his arm hooked under Eddie’s knees and it’s like something in his chest caves. He never thought he’d ever be homesick for a shithole like Derry.

Eddie sighs, then uses the tissues his mother left by his bed for his alleged allergies to clean up. Afterward he feels drained, like someone used an ice cream scoop to empty him out.

He stares at the ceiling trying to bring Richie’s face back into focus in his mind’s eye until his mother calls him down for dinner.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok but here me out, there's a good reason for this. The excellent HBO documentary [When I Knew](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1251763/) has a segment where a guy describes doing exactly this: using a [Farrah Fawcett poster](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2015/08/farrah-fawcett-red-swimsuit-bruce-mcbroom-history-of-fashion) to try to change himself and inevitably thinking about men instead. This idea was born and wouldn't leave me alone. It's a dated reference by the 80s but there you go.
> 
> Eddie is in Paramus because I like the name but it's also comfortably close to NYC. Richie is in Calaveras because I like the name (it means skulls in spanish), it's close to Los Angeles and Mark Twain wrote a great story set there. 
> 
> Tommy Torrance is named for the wonderful Tom McCourt, an openly gay character in Cell, by Stephen King, and of course, the Torrances from The Shining and Doctor Sleep.
> 
> Richie wore a Freese's shirt in the movie [ and it has a cool story attached to it](http://www.looper.com/84888/easter-eggs-missed/).
> 
> "Sorry Charlie" is a reference to the [StarKist tuna commercials which ran until the 80s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_the_Tuna) and it was a very popular phrase. But it really came to mind because it was referenced in a [Richard Siken poem](http://youngerpoets.yupnet.org/2008/04/17/you-are-jeff-crush-by-richard-siken/) and I'm crazy about him.
> 
> And finally the title is from [Get a Grip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrdZNNG4S8g) by Semisonic which is a song about jerking it.


End file.
